Somewhat offtopic, but I'm finding it kinda difficult to believe that in this job market in the US, there are people lucky enough to be employed as developers that don't understand basic RDBMS concepts like indexes or joins. I'm just an undergraduate, but even at this level competition for jobs is incredibly fierce--I can't imagine someone being considered for code-writing positions lacking knowledge of crossjoin, outer joins, indexes, B+ trees, kd trees, etc. That kind of stuff comes up in almost every interview I've had so far, and I've got nothing yet for a while. :(

Do you actually encounter on a regular basis this kind of clueless-ness? How do these people manage to get hired?

Not enough people care to change this ethos. There's a large amount of people here who would do anything to fight the "terrorists". That's how this happened in the first place.

A day of classes at a university where there curiously often aren't electrical outlets in CS classrooms.

The US has a LOOOONG history of corn subsidies (originally designed to help struggling agricultural families from falling under and ruining US food prices). By now, of course, most of it goes to corporates that own huge tracts of farms. It's a very entrenched interest group. I imagine you've seen at least one of those "don't hate HFCS, it's just like sugar!!!111" commercials on TV.

Is that seriously where we've arrived at, where a hardware company gets kudos just for sending back the defective card?

I would certainly hope they'd be legally obligated to send it back if they refuse the RMA. Personally, I think that if they can't follow through on their promise, they should be obligated to refund the purchase price of the product, but I realize this kind of common courtesy is none too common these days.

...Seriously?

There's a vote to concede in HoN, too, but that seems to be used more when people leave the game and don't reconnect, or towards the end when the winner is obvious, not so much as a "The hell with this team, we're done" button.

I had never heard about LoL until after this thread--probably something for me to look into. I like the 'dungeon crawler' feel, but as the GGP said, the community is quite noxious, and it's not really the type of game one can learn by soloing everything on the map in practice mode.

That would be RIT's Computer Science system administrator. All our non-Windows, non-mac labs run Solaris, on Solaris workstations.

And we learn database concepts on Oracle.

Is this awesome? (y/n)

Echo this. I was lucky enough to get into the closed beta a few weeks ago, when one of my friends sent me an invite key. There was no tutorial when I started (though there's one now), so I just went into a no stats game. The people there, and in most HoN games, seem to be just generally mean, elitist people who votekick at a moment's notice when another player doesn't exhibit some tidbit of knowledge that they're supposed to have acquired. This is really bad in HoN, since those votekicks affect your ability to play legitimate games. So, if you know a lot about DoTA, good game. Otherwise, stay away from it unless you know other people in meatspace that can help you out.

To torture and a dishonest government? Yes.